Sunday, June 13, 2010

Owen Fitzgerald Camera Angles

Owen Fitzgerald can stage scenes from any angle and make it look easy.In this Dennis story about the family playing pool, every shot is a new angle.Drawing poses of someone playing pool would be tricky enough even left to right, but Owen does it from every possible perspective, seemingly without effort.And he still manages to make the posing look natural and balanced.I wonder if the reason Owen Fitzgerald is not better known is that his work does look so effortless. It's incredibly subtle and sophisticated drawing - especially for cartoons - but you almost don't notice just because he makes it look simple.Lesser artists are much more heralded and imitated than Fitzgerald - like the Archie artists who mostly draw everything left to right and can only draw wooden profiles, front views and 3/ views.It's even more remarkable that he can solve all these difficult drawing problems- and do it in another person's style.This is the kind of guy you would want heading your layout department.

34 comments:

Owen Fitzgerald's staging and posing techniques amaze me every time. He's almost like a magician. I also think he draws some of the cutest girls ever, besides other cartoonists like Howie Post and Dan Gordon.

Boomerang showed this awful Dennis the Menace show from the 80s yesterday. I didn't watch much of it, but it was very poorly drawn compared to the original comics. It makes me appreciate them even more.

Fitzgerald was a master! I know that vanishing points are used to draw certain things in perspective such as buildings and stuff but is there any way to use vanishing points to put characters in a scene?

I love the way he sticks to a solid colour for the background. At the start he establishes that the floor is blue and the walls are yellow. Then when we get into the pool game, he doesn't need to draw any details in the background - just show a colour. If we see blue, we know we're in a down-shot and if we see yellow we know we're in an up-shot. And that's before any characters or table have been drawn! Great stuff!

I first discovered owen fitzgerald through shane glines' site. Sadly, when I first saw his work, I saaid to myself, "wow this looks like decarlo!" When I delved deeper I was absolutely floored by the spontaneity of his drawings, and soon decarlo's work started to look incredibly stiff by comparison. Fitzgerald is a huge inspiration to me, and one of the reasons I really want to become a better artist. Thanks for posting so much of his material.

This is awesome! I'm so tired of how comics these days, especially alternative ones, use the exact same 'shot' and poses panel after panel after panel! It does look very plain and effortless in those pictures, but compared to what (most of) todays comics artists are doing it's wild and innovative!

I've been a fan of yours since Mighty Mouse. I started with Hank in '81 on the Marvel comic which lasted for 12 issues. Hank had started a training program and had already hired 2 artists.I moved from NY to Monterey, CA and became the third. Hank invested in a studio in Pebble Beach and Bob Bugg was doing the Sundays in Connecticut. Bob didn't want to relocate, so Hank started us on the Sundays. It was pretty grueling fun. Hank would send us out on sketching trips and would critique our sketchpads.Fred Toole was still involved with the writing at that point and would regale us with stories about the early days with Fitzgerald, Wiseman etc...There were periodic visits to the studio by local artists like Preston Blair, Eldon Dedini and Gus Arriola,so it was a dream come true for a green kid from NY. Karen Matchette(another artist)and I visited Ed Benedict in the early 90's when he was in Carmel. Karen had started doing the Flintstones comic strip and Ed had agreed to give her some pointers. I mentioned you and your appreciation for his work and he said you'd just visited the week before. Ed said he had always wanted to show Hank the design superiority of the FOUR fingered hand over the FIVE fingered hand. THAT was a magical day. I moved back to NY in '97 after Hank had closed the studio and we were all communicating via fax. I had 15 years of 9 to 5 workdays with Hank. He was an amazing guy and an incredible artist.

In 2000, I suggested to Hank that he should do a how-to book. His answer was that he had enough to do keeping us in line. Of course, he left us all in 2001, so it was not to be.Hank was really a 'lemme just show you how' type teacher. He'd just reach for the tracing paper, lay it over your work and VOILA!....there it was!

As for online tutorials, we couldn't come CLOSE to what you're doing here!

I'm terribly shocked when i see peoples who draw stock figures characters and put a comic-book on it. After the comics-strips decline in the mid-1970's, we assist today to the degradation of comics as art today because peoples who can't draw well pretend they draw well to be hip and made it for moneys.

That's why i like better old comics from the middle of the 20th century. They have a lot of good sources you will ever found who was vanish today. Peoples who mastered some old comics to the young audience today have the bad trend to digitalise the panels and drawings backgrounds, eliminating the pure effect of what this comic really are at the first time.

Fitzgerald is without contradict one of the best drawings artists ever that i never have the chance to read his works as a kid. Thank you!

I wonder if Owen's name would be better known if he had stayed at an animation studio for a length of time when layout people finally got credit (like Gribbroek and Noble). I gather Owen had two stops at Warners, the last one fairly brief.

I'm editing a hardback collection of Owen Fitzgerald DENNIS THE MENACE comic book stories for Papercutz Publishing and am beginning to choose which stories will appear in the book. Are there favorites that you'd recommend? Any input would be great!

The first DENNIS THE MENACE volume I edited, featuring Al Wiseman stories, has just been released.